Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

As a young man at Corinth, Oedipus is taunted at a feast (or by a drunkard) with not being Polybus’s true son. Disturbed, he questions his supposed parents; their reassurances do not quiet him. He goes to Delphi to ask about his birth. The oracle does not name his parents; instead it prophesies that he will kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, and still believing Polybus and Merope to be his parents, Oedipus resolves never to return to Corinth. He turns toward Boeotia and the roads that lead away from the home he fears to pollute. On the way—at a narrow fork of three roads in Phocis, where the ways from Delphi, Daulis, and Thebes meet—he encounters a chariot and an older man with attendants. The driver and the old man (Laius, traveling to Delphi, in Apollodorus’s account to inquire about the Sphinx, or in Sophocles simply abroad) order Oedipus aside. A quarrel escalates: blows are struck; Oedipus, in anger, kills the old man and most of his company (one attendant escapes in the tragic version and later becomes a witness). Neither combatant knows the other’s identity. The son has fulfilled the first half of the oracle without recognizing it. Oedipus continues on toward Thebes. Laius’s corpse is found; the murder is blamed on highwaymen; Creon (or the city) fails to pursue the killer with full rigor. The crossroads killing is the hinge of the Labdacid doom: patricide accomplished in ignorance, under the very god’s prophecy that Oedipus thought he was fleeing.